Windows 8 PCs with good build quality and 1080p displays but middling keyboards.

Acer has just announced the first part of its Windows 8 lineup: the Acer Aspire S7 series Ultrabooks are 11.6" and 13.3" laptops which both include 1080p capacitive IPS touchscreens, as well as Ivy Bridge processors, backlit keyboards, 4GB of RAM, and two 64GB solid state drives configured in a RAID 0 configuration to provide extra speed. Both laptops are due to be released on October 26 along with Windows 8, and prices start at $1,199 for the 11" model and $1,399 for the 13".

We got some hands-on time with these laptops last month, and came away fairly impressed by their build quality—both are made mostly of aluminum (though the 13" model has a lid made of white Gorilla Glass rather than the aluminum lid the 11" uses), and as a result the laptops have a sturdiness that is quite unlike past plastic Acer models like the Timeline M5 we recently reviewed. The 13" model measures 12.73" x 8.79" x 0.47" and weighs 2.86 pounds, while the 11" model measures 11.17" x 7.70" x 0.48" and weighs 2.29 pounds.

Enlarge/ The lid of the 11" model is aluminum, while the lid of the 13" model is white Gorilla Glass. Both machines are quite attractive.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The bodies and bezels of the S7 series are all-aluminum and very sturdy.

Andrew Cunningham

The screens are one of these laptops' biggest selling points—we praised the 1080p IPS display in the ASUS Zenbook Prime for upping its game relative to the cheap 1366x768 TN panels used by most PCs, and the touchscreens on the Aspire S7 laptops are equally impressive. Colors and viewing angles are excellent, and the high resolution should satisfy both the people who want more screen real estate, and those who want to use Windows' built-in scaling to get a larger (but less pixelated) image.

The hinges are also impressive—they've been made extra stiff to prevent the screens from leaning backward as users interact with the machines' touchscreens, and the panel on the 13" model can lay completely flat if desired.

Enlarge/ Both laptops have firm "dual torque" hinges, and the 13" model will fold 180 degrees to lie flat on your desk.

Andrew Cunningham

The keyboard is one area of contention—both models use the same keyboard, which takes the tilde key from the number row (where it typically sits to the left of the 1 key) and moves it next to an extremely compressed Caps Lock key. It also uses the odd backwards L Enter key of other recent Acer keyboards, as well as half-height arrow keys, and lacks dedicated function keys in spite of there being plenty of room for another row in both laptops. Like I have with most island style keyboards, I found the keys to be shallow, though without the mushy feel that accompanies some cheaper Ultrabooks. Both models use an aluminum multitouch trackpad with no dedicated buttons; the trackpad in the 11" model is slightly smaller than that in that in the 13" model.

Enlarge/ The keyboard on the S7 series has made some non-standard layout decisions, and like all island-style keyboards is very shallow.

Andrew Cunningham

Finally, both laptops have a decent but not mind-blowing selection of ports: the 13" model has two USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, a headphone jack, and a Micro HDMI port, while the 11" model sports two USB 3.0 ports, a microSD card reader, and a headphone jack. Expect full reviews of these laptops as they become available.

69 Reader Comments

Oh dear, that keyboard... actually it looks like a good amount of thought has gone into removing some amount of historical clutter. That's not to say I wouldn't repeatedly want to throw it at the wall for the first month or so.

Unless you can turn it into a tablet by folding the keyboard out of the way, I can't see the point of the touch screen.

Also 16:9 screens just piss me off. 16:10 is bad enough on a small laptop without going for an even worse aspect ratio.

Completely agree here. I need to replace my old (and now permanently defunct) Sony Vaio from '09, and love the MBA my wife has. I decided to hold out until Win8 tabtops came out; however, the above entries seem to take away from using the tablet function due to a poor design decision.

Note: I would like the tablet functionality for reading magazines, books, quick viewing of my fantasy team, etc. I want the keyboard for extensive typing, and in the age of BYOD I think the dedicated keyboard is necessary.

Almost all non-Apple ultrabooks have a problem with hinge stiffness. When you go to lift the screen up, the whole laptop just tips backward. Apple has really nailed the right level of hinge resistance. I wonder if these will be even worse than the previous generation of PC ultrabooks, since they now have "extra stiff" hinges.

I don't see any problem with RAID 0 SSDs. Both SSD packages have their own fault tolerance mechanisms, and SSD failure rates are no higher than for mechanical disks. Plus, SSD failures tend to be more gradual than the "click of death" type failures you run into with conventional disks. RAID 0 does nothing to reduce latency, so the speed argument was a bit silly for HDDs. RAID 0 with SSDs would make for some pretty impressive disk throughput.

That said, 2x64GB SSDs certainly costs more than one 128GB SSD (to the consumer, anyway) and that space could have been used for extra battery instead. Any word on whether they're using a standard laptop drive package for each "disk?"

I guess you could change it to RAID 1 if you want, or skip RAID altogether. Yes, you need to format your machine, but I always do that with mines, to remove all crap-ware included by OEMs.Also, I wouldn't be so concerned about failure rate, these are SSDs after all.

Adding a touchscreen to a laptop is sheer idiocy. Just because something is technically possible and just because the OS maker is stupid enough to support it doesn't make it logical for the user.

I love touchscreen devices. I also love keyboard/pointer devices. But they are very different paradigms. Mixing the two is just bringing complexity to the user and adding unnecessary cost (for a useless touchscreen).

If you want a laptop, don't pay for a touchscreen. If you want a touchscreen, don't burden yourself with the weight and size that come with a built-in keyboard. You can't have it both ways without compromises that make both use cases worse.

lol, I'm glad I'm not the only one that saw that and thought it was weird.

I thought the other commenters must be wrong and RAID 0 *must* be the mirrored one and not the striped one. It *has* to be because no "Professionally Tuned" machine would have striped disks with no parity. Right? Oh, wrong. WTH Acer?

Adding a touchscreen to a laptop is sheer idiocy. Just because something is technically possible and just because the OS maker is stupid enough to support it doesn't make it logical for the user.

...

If you want a laptop, don't pay for a touchscreen. If you want a touchscreen, don't burden yourself with the weight and size that come with a built-in keyboard. You can't have it both ways without compromises that make both use cases worse.

Of course, if you use your laptop on a desk, at arm's length, the touchscreen is kind of useless, and you should be using a mouse. But using a laptop on a desk is, from a usage model perspective, just like using a desktop computer, just in a different casing.

I would argue that a laptop on a desk is more cumbersome to use than a desktop on a desk - you cannot push your screen further away from your keyboard, the screen is anyway smaller than a desktop monitor, and probably of much worse quality, except if you have a very expensive laptop, etc

When you use your laptop as a laptop, I mean on the go, in crammed spaces, in bed before sleep, or even on your.. wait for it.. lap... Then a touch screen on a laptop is VERY convenient. It's like a tablet on a kickstand.

Before you ask, yes, I do have such a machine (by coincidence, also made by Acer). After using it for two years, I have become so accustomed to the touch screen that I usually find myself trying to use touchscreens on laptops that have none...

And, if after all said and done, and after trying one, you find that a laptop with a touch screen is not for you... then don't buy one. The PC market is, thankfully, very diverse.

No, it doesn't look particularly like a metallic MBA. There are only so many ways to make a thin laptop without breaking the rules of ergonomics (which has happened). I think it looks more sony with the white body, the white keys, the square edges when closed.

It's starting to be a bit tiresome, no not every light colored thin laptop looks like an apple, not every metal coffee maker looks like a delonghi, not every overpriced pair of blue jeans is Gap.

You do at least get better total storage throughput. You ever see that video where Samsun RAID-0'd a whole bunch of SSDs together?

In general, SSD's speed increases with size - most SSD's do some form of "raid-lite" internally.

When 128GB SSD's are already pushing the limits of SATA3, this is just a bizarre decision. Yes, the 1080p is nice - except you're stuck with Windows8 shit scaling on the desktop where it could actually be useful, and the integrated graphics is nowhere near powerful enough to run games comfortably at that size. As mentioned, touchscreen on a laptop will get old fast, you're not going to be extending your arm out to navigate screen elements when you're in front of it, and if you want to use it as a tablet, why spend $1200 for a huge, awkward one?

It's basically a hodge-podge of bulletpoints crammed in one package without much sense for the actual benefit to the end user. "Raid0! 1080p! Touchscreen!"

As mentioned, touchscreen on a laptop will get old fast, you're not going to be extending your arm out to navigate screen elements when you're in front of it, and if you want to use it as a tablet, why spend $1200 for a huge, awkward one?

I've heard the only two people I know who have both MBA's and iPad 3's complain that they've gotten so used to their iPad's that they keep touching their MBA screens when they switch back and forth, forgetting it's not a touch screen. I laughed at this but I can see that once you get used to something new, you expect it everywhere.

Not a common use case and totally anecdotal but did surprise me and made me wonder why it's such a bad thing if it was there. I wish my ancient T400 had a touch screen, sometimes you just want to swipe.

"Hi, I'd like to buy a laptop, but I would like one with double the chance of failure."

So you'd prefer a single 128GB SSD?

I think your perception of the failure probabilities is off. 2x64GB SSDs is just 128GB of flash storage accessed over two SATA buses instead of one. Sure there's some duplication (i.e. the controller), but that will raise the failure rate only *slightly* over a single 128GB SSD.

The majority of the SSD is the storage, and the failure rate on that is the same whether it's in one lump or two.

It's like saying I want my RAM on one DIMM rather than two because I'll get fewer memory errors.

"Hi, I'd like to buy a laptop, but I would like one with double the chance of failure."

So you'd prefer a single 128GB SSD?

I think your perception of the failure probabilities is off. 2x64GB SSDs is just 128GB of flash storage accessed over two SATA buses instead of one. Sure there's some duplication (i.e. the controller), but that will raise the failure rate only *slightly* over a single 128GB SSD.

The majority of the SSD is the storage, and the failure rate on that is the same whether it's in one lump or two.

It's like saying I want my RAM on one DIMM rather than two because I'll get fewer memory errors.

The failure rate is close to double, like he said. It's not that the laptop has two hard drives that act independently storing data (which would be more like your DIMM analogy). The drives are in a striped config which means that you take the data to be written and write half to one disk and half to the other. So if the file you were writing was composed of a string 'ABCDEF' then Disk 1 would store ACE and Disk 2 would store BDF (of course, it doesn't store individual characters, it breaks the file into blocks then stores each block on alternating disks).

What that does for you is increase performance since you can write at twice the rate of one disk. What it costs you is that if one disk fails then all the data is lost. What any sane person would do if they wanted to stripe the data is also include a parity disk (or more than one) which sacrifices some disk storage for data integrity and so if a disk fails you can recover the data that was on it by looking at the data on the remaining disks.

What it costs you is that if one disk fails then all the data is lost.

His point, though, was that this is *also* true if you are using a single 128GB disk, and that 2 64-GB SSD disks are unlikely to have a combined failure rate significantly higher than a single SSD with 2 64-GB modules in it.

Quote:

When 128GB SSD's are already pushing the limits of SATA3, this is just a bizarre decision.

If you're pushing the limits of the SATA link, that's a clear win for RAID-0, because now you get 2 SATA links.

What it costs you is that if one disk fails then all the data is lost.

His point, though, was that this is *also* true if you are using a single 128GB disk, and that 2 64-GB SSD disks are unlikely to have a combined failure rate significantly higher than a single SSD with 2 64-GB modules in it.

I agree with you about what his point was, the problem is that he is wrong. The failure rate is almost double.

I've heard the only two people I know who have both MBA's and iPad 3's complain that they've gotten so used to their iPad's that they keep touching their MBA screens when they switch back and forth, forgetting it's not a touch screen. I laughed at this but I can see that once you get used to something new, you expect it everywhere.snippage

I think that happens alot for things "touch" or physical motion related, at least it's true for me. I still expect every hotel remote control to let me pause live TV like my TIVO peanut does at home and I still expect mouse gestures on other peoples' mouse when I'm using their computer.

Adding a touchscreen to a laptop is sheer idiocy. Just because something is technically possible and just because the OS maker is stupid enough to support it doesn't make it logical for the user.

I love touchscreen devices. I also love keyboard/pointer devices. But they are very different paradigms. Mixing the two is just bringing complexity to the user and adding unnecessary cost (for a useless touchscreen).

If you want a laptop, don't pay for a touchscreen. If you want a touchscreen, don't burden yourself with the weight and size that come with a built-in keyboard. You can't have it both ways without compromises that make both use cases worse.

I agree. Touch screens are a big thing right now, so everything's gotta have one. It's a great input method that has its applications, but sticking one to a laptop doesn't make sense for ergonomic reasons. It works best for small devices that you hold up in front of you when you interact (ie. smart phones and smaller tablets), Using touch with a free standing laptop is not just awkward, it can lead to an increase of RSIs.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.